Since the protests that happened in Charlottesville over the weekend, I’ve been reading more comment threads than is good for any person to ever do, but it brought up a common problem that I saw during the controversy over Colin Kaepernick’s protest.

There are those that are simply calling a spade a spade and then there are the people reacting to that with some variation of:

Yeah, but BLM and antifa are also committing evil. You should be calling them out too.

And while the riots are by no means excusable, they aren’t the problem here. Instead, those riots are being used to distract from what is actually going on in this country. By calling attention to them, detractors are attempting to lessen the poison of their own views.

They are, in essence, saying that it’s okay to be a white nationalist or a racist because surely that’s less bad than rioting.

But the problem with that mindset is that it doesn’t actually matter.

When you refuse to name an evil as evil, without any qualification, you are effectively saying that it is not actually evil. You’re communicating that it’s okay to be a racist because some of the people you are protesting have been involved in riots.

Of course, that’s the logical end of that view. Racism says that people of color are less than human. It denies them the imago Dei that is within them. It says to them, “God made a mistake when He made you.”